Drummer Nick Mason believes legendary rock band Pink Floyd “looked after Syd Barrett very badly”.
This, he says, was not intentional as the group “didn’t know any better” once they had removed Barrett from the band. Speaking about Barrett’s time in the band, Mason suggested the rest of the band were “blinkered” by the possibilites of success and took little notice of their ex-bandmate’s declining mental health. Mason would note that “LSD damage” is still a suggested problem for Barrett, who died in 2006. Barrett would have little contact with his Pink Floyd bandmates after leaving the group, though did appear at the studio while the band were recording Wish You Were Here. Mason, speaking to Uncut magazine, shared his thoughts on the Barrett situation Pink Floyd had to contend with in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He said: “We were so blinkered. I maintain that we looked after Syd very badly – but we didn’t know any better. There’s still the belief that it was LSD damage, but it could have been perfectly straightforward, that he wanted to be an artist and not a pop star. And actually, that could break you, and certainly not do you any good at all to be forced down a road you didn’t want to go.”
Bassist Roger Waters would suggest LSD had played its part in Barrett’s worsening mental health in various interviews given by the veteran performer. Waters would later claim he was just about to call Barrett when he heard the founding member of Pink Floyd had died.
Speaking to TVNZ in 2007, Waters was asked about how he felt about Barrett’s death. Barrett died on July 6, 2006. Waters said: “Sort of not very hard you know because Syd kind of died forty years ago for me. When we spent months and months and months going ‘what’s happened where are you?’ and he’d kind of gone and he’d stayed gone.
“So obviously I was very sad to hear that he was sick. I heard he was sick about three days before he died. I finally got Rosemary’s phone number and was just about to call when I heard he’d died.
“I’ve thought about it since on a number of occasions and I think about it still and I find myself going back to the Saturday morning painting classes we did together when he was eleven and I was ten back in 1954.
“I find myself going back to those times but the kind of distance I experience with Syd is an extraordinary thing. It is real and I had tonnes of emails from people saying ‘I’m sorry for your loss and this and that and the other’ but I’m not really half as moved as I thought I would be.”
